Aphids & Greenflies

Photos taken:
Late May to June

I've been wanting to photograph aphids for ages and it's for one very simple reason: they're cute. Like mites, aphids are one of those bugs that are literally just a shape with dots for eyes, which is peak creature design quite frankly. Very few animals can hope to be even a fraction as good at that.

Also like mites, aphids are tiny and difficult to get pictures of which is why it has taken me a while just to get the handful you see here today. I've mentioned it in the last few blog posts but I have a macro lens now! It's just a cheap clip-on one but it's been surprisingly useful so far. For example:

Aphids are absolutely wild. If you haven't already, please do yourself a favour and read up about how they reproduce, it's so weird. Not only do they clone themselves for most of the year, but they also give birth to live young that are already pregnant with yet more clones, which means that yes, all of the aphids you're seeing here are the exact same creature copy and pasted over multiple generations.

You'll also notice a lot of ants crawling around nearby. This is because they have a symbiotic relationship; ants protect the aphids from predators like ladybirds and wasps and in return the ants get to milk the sweet honeydew aphids excrete from their rectum. Again, weird creatures.

Once they've cloned themselves enough, aphids will start producing winged offspring which then fly to another plant and start the process all over again. I've always called the winged variants blackflies or greenflies depending on the colour.

Here's some blackflies from the same plant:

And here's a greenfly that managed to wander inside. This one doesn't appear to have any wings now I look at it, which makes me wonder how it got inside in the first place...

Finally, I noticed this strange pale bug resting on the plant stems and spent a long time trying to work out what species it is.

I eventually realised it's probably just an old moult some of the aphids left behind lol